Prior research has demonstrated that teens play a critical role in helping establish the motivational atmosphere of their sports teams. Motivational environments with supportive peers have a greater association with behavior patterns in teen athletes than individual ego orientation. Therefore, the type of training climate facilitated by the coach can help determine the team's success.

Hypotheses / Research Questions

The aim of the study was to examine the role of a peer-created motivational climate in place of an adult-leader created motivational climate. The second purpose was to test a four-stage causal sequence model. The hypothesis was that the peer motivational climate would influence athletes' perception of need satisfaction for competence, relatedness, and autonomy.

Methods

The study examined 424 non-elite athletes ages 11-16 participating in team sports (basketball, soccer, and volleyball) in Estonia. The participants were given psychological questionnaires initially and then their behavior was monitored over a course of a year. The researchers were assessing several different measures of data: the peer-created motivational environment, basic psychological needs, intrinsic motivation, and persistence. The researchers used a MANOVA test to analyze the data.

Results

The data confirmed the proposed four-stage causal sequence model. Intrinsic motivation was found to be an accurate predictor of persistence at 12 months. When the team motivational context was task-oriented rather than ego-oriented, the athletes reported higher levels of autonomy needs satisfaction, competence needs satisfaction, and relatedness needs satisfaction. A task-involving peer motivational climate was related to intrinsic motivation.

Conclusion

As expected, a task-involving peer motivational climate has a positive impact on psychological need satisfaction variables, including intrinsic motivation, which influences persistence. An ego-involving peer climate was negatively related to positive psychological measures.

Relevance

Because the research aims to examine gender differences in injury reporting rates, it might be worth considering whether male or female sports teams are more likely to promote peer motivational climates instead of ego-involving peer climates.

Angelini, J.R. (2008). Television sports and athlete sex: Looking at the differences in watching male and female athletes. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, 52(1), 16-32.

Rationale

There is a difference in coverage of sports that feature women compared to sports that feature men, both in time allotted for coverage and how sportscasters speak about the participants in those sports. Therefore, the researchers were curious about how males and females differed in their cognitive and physiological processing of televised sports that feature male and female athletes.

Hypotheses / Research Questions

The first hypothesis was that male study participants would self-report higher levels of arousal for men's sports than for women's sports. The second hypothesis was that female study participants would self-report higher levels of arousal for women's sports than for men's sports. There were also two research questions. Those research questions focused on whether the participant's self-reported levels of arousal would correlate to the physiological levels of arousal generated during the viewing of the opposite- gender clips. There were four minor hypotheses that dealt with measuring arousal.

Methods

The study participants consisted of 53 students in a telecommunications course at a Midwestern University. There were 28 female and 25 male participants. The researcher used 24 30-second clips from sports events, which were recorded from broadcast sports events and presented them, in four different randomly assigned-orders, to the study participants. The clips featured either male or female athletes and all of the clips were delivered via the same media. Arousal was measured by self-report and by skin conductance. Cognitive effort was measured via heart rate. Between sports clips, the participants were given an unrelated message to clear their memories before viewing the next clip. Participants were also tested on recognition of the clips.

Results

Male participants did rate sports clips featuring male athletes as more arousing than those containing female athletes. Female participants rated sports clips featuring female athletes as less arousing than those containing male athletes. Participants' self-reported levels of arousal did not correlate to their physiological levels of arousal during sports featuring athletes opposite of their own sex. All of the participants scored higher on recognition tests about the clips featuring the female athletes.

Conclusion

Because both males and females reported greater levels of self-arousal for sports featuring males, the preference for televising male sporting events makes sense, but those arousal levels were not substantiated by the indicators of arousal.Furthermore, the higher recall for the female athlete clips could be due to a novelty factor.

Relevance

Males and females have been conditioned to expect different things from male and female athletes. Males are expected to be strong and invulnerable, which may hamper them from reporting injuries.

Coaching style has been linked to success in sports performance, with numerous coaches taking and advocating a very aggressive coaching style. The point of this study was to examine whether an aggressive coaching style was perceived favorably by athletes.

Hypotheses / Research Questions

The first hypothesis was that the more that coaches are seen by their athletes as using verbally and physically aggressive tactics to induce performance the more unfavorably athletes would evaluate coaches' communication. The second hypothesis was that when athletes assess coaches' communication unfavorably they would report less sportsmanship, less satisfaction with coaches, and less team success.

Methods

The study participants were 192 male former high-school athletes that had participated in football, basketball, or hockey. The study participants were overwhelmingly Caucasian, so that the study results may not translate to athletes from other ethnic backgrounds. The participants were asked to complete a multi-scale questionnaire, focusing on the head coach of a particular sport that they had played in high school. The questions focused on the coach's communication style, sportsmanship behavior, and the team's performance.

Results

The study found that "when coaches used verbal aggression and to some extent physical aggression to induce athletes to try harder and play better coaches were seen by their athletes as being less credible in terms of character and expertise, and as having less desirable communicator style in terms of less attentiveness, unfriendliness, not relaxed, and conveying a less favorable communicator image" (Kassing & Infante, 1999, p.115).

Conclusion

An aggressive communication style is not positively correlated with performance and makes coaches seem less credible to their athletes.

Relevance

Some sports are notorious for having aggressive coaches, and, because those coaches are seen as less credible, the athletes participating in those sports may be less likely to report injuries to those coaches.

Research suggested that women were more likely than men to present with physical symptoms, but none of the research had focused on healthy athletes.

Hypotheses / Research Questions

The study author did not specifically state a research question, but the point of the research was to determine whether there would be a gender difference in the rate of physical symptom reporting by healthy teenage athletes.

Methods

The study focused on 1,465 high school athletes, between the ages of 13 and 19 years of age. They were given echocardiographic screenings via a hand-carried cardiac ultrasound device. The participants were also asked to fill out a questionnaire during the screening, which asked about physical symptoms during activities or exercise.

Results

The results demonstrated that female athletes were much more likely to report physical symptoms than male athletes, and that these symptoms were not correlated to abnormalities on detected by the echocardiogram.

Conclusion

Females reported symptoms, which were not substantiated by the tests given to the otherwise healthy athletes, at twice the rate as males.

Relevance

Because females are twice as likely as males to report symptoms, even when none appear to be present, one would expect to find a much higher rate of reporting among females experiencing concussions or suspected concussions.

Anshel, M. (2009). Racial and gender differences on sources of acute stress and coping style among competitive athletes. The Journal of Social Psychology, 149(2), 159-177.

Rationale

Individual athlete coping style can be important because those athletes who exhibit adaptive coping are more likely to have improved performance and less likely to have heightened muscular tension, narrowed attentional focusing, and poor sport performance. Prior research suggested that women are more likely to exhibit advanced coping than men.

Hypotheses / Research Questions

The authors hypothesized that athletes would differ significantly on their sources of stress and their coping styles, as functions of race and gender. They overall hypotheses were that Caucasian men would use an approach coping style more than any other group and that men would more frequently use an approach coping style than women.